This month, we had an awesome interview with Ashland Bike Company, a Reid retailer in Ohio, United States. Since opening in 2017, Ashland aims to make cycling as accessible as possible, which has fuelled their partnership with a local church to help repair donated bikes as well as ‘Project WILD’, a summer youth riding program that allows young people of any ability and financial background to enjoy cycling.

Read on to discover what else they have done for their local community and which Reid models are their best-sellers!

Introduce yourselves…

I’m Tony Bunt and I started Ashland Bike Company in 2017 after teaching high school science for 9 years. My wife, Michelle, and I were high school sweethearts and moved from Ashland, Ohio to Nampa, Idaho after we finished college. In the mountains of Idaho, in contrast to the Midwest world of Ohio, I really fell in love with mountain biking and bike shop life. My good friend Adam Haynes started a shop before Michelle and I came back to Ohio and I watched and helped him get his shop off the ground. Once back in Ohio, I found a big vacancy in our town for the kind of high quality bike shop I was used to out west. After teaching four more years, we launched ABC and haven’t looked back. My background is in endurance sports like running and long distance riding, but I love to just grab my mountain bike and rip through the local single-track. My kids also ride and we have always joked that even though my wife doesn’t ride, it’s an endurance sport just keeping us all fuelled up with good home cooked food. Michelle’s main hobby is gardening and she’s got quite the green thumb!

The past few years we have also operated a 501(c)(3) called Project WILD (formerly the Ashland Bike Project). This is primarily run by one of the coolest people I know, Ashley Hendershot. Ashley has helped us develop a tremendous summer youth riding program and is the head coach of our local NICA team. She is also an accomplished athlete and now is training for the masters UCI World Championships in Australia this coming Spring. She’ll be racing XCO and eMTB this coming year.

Where can your store be found?

Ashland Bike Company is located in downtown Ashland, Ohio. It’s a rural community but full of life and growth. People in Ashland are genuinely very nice, so much so that it’s been said it’s the “world headquarters of nice people.”

What does cycling mean to you?

I started cycling as a kid just to get around town. I grew up in a very small town north of Ashland and we really lived out the saying that if you wanted to know where all the kids were at just look for the collection of bikes parked in the front yard. Later on, I discovered that riding brought me an immense amount of joy and clarity to my busy mind. I found out later in life that I have ADD and cycling is a big part of managing the dopamine levels that are all out of whack with ADD/ADHD brains. Cycling is a mental health requirement for me and of course physically it helps me feel my best.

How do you integrate with your local community?

Well, as I mentioned above, we started a nonprofit to help develop youth mountain biking, but we also built a 3.5 mile mountain bike trail for the city of Ashland. We want to continue to make cycling as accessible as possible. We also partnered with a church group to help get donated bikes repaired and put to members in the community needing a fresh start or coming off of an abusive or addiction filled past. Being downtown lets all kinds of interesting people come into our shop, and we definitely have our regulars, some of which have unique needs we try to help with.

Do you have any interesting store stories that you can share with us?

As with any small business, there are numerous funny moments and mistakes that were made, but the most interesting story is just how much we’ve seen the city of Ashland grow since we opened in 2017! I also spent a good portion of my free time in 2020 mapping a bikepacking/ultra-cycling route across Ohio on backroads and gravel roads. We named it the Dirty Water Route 500km and it’s been fantastic! It’s a huge rush when someone stops in the shop while riding the route!

How long have you been a Reid retailer?

We started carrying some Reid bikes by necessity in 2020 due to the limited product availability from our other brand partners. Now we are really excited about Reid’s e-bikes and they have been great sellers for us in a very short time frame.

What is your best selling Reid product?

All of the Reid e-bikes have been doing well for us. The Blacktops and the Quests are our two best sellers. We love how well built they are for the price and they seriously have outsold every other e-bike we’ve tried selling the past 6+ years.

How has your experience with Reid been?

We have had great experiences so far with Reid. You can tell a lot about a bike the moment you take it out of the box. Over-innovative designs that take hours to assemble and are expensive for the customers to buy and own are our least favourite products to try and sell. Reid bikes are well built and simple, which is refreshing in a world of technological innovation for the sake of differentiating one product from another. We value this kind of product design in our little Midwest town and because of that we’re very excited to do more business with Reid in the future!

Finally, what advice would you give to those who are considering getting into bike riding or perhaps have never tried it before?

Examine yourself and tendencies, and ask when, where, why, and how you want to ride. Then go to a great bike shop and buy the best bike within your budget. At our shop, sometimes it means that we actually will recommend a used bike if your budget doesn’t fit with a new bike, but remember that any bike is only a good bike if you maintain it properly. Budget for maintenance or learn how to do it yourself, but don’t neglect your bike. It will break down if you neglect it or at the very least will be less fun to ride. We teach our young riders to do an “ABC” check in which A stands for “air,” B stands for “brakes,” and C stands for “chain” but also for “clunks!” If any of these checks are not passed you really need to get someone to look over your bike.

Finally, when you get your bike, get on it regularly and in short intervals at first. Everyone complains about saddles but most people don’t give themselves enough time to adapt to a bike saddle which leads them down a trail to find the biggest, softest, “couch cushion” bike saddle on the market. Often this doesn’t help either because they just do too much too soon.